Why Pursue Virtue?

There's a lot of questions that come up on learning about virtue ethics. If developing virtue takes effort, time, and dedication, why should I do it? Perhaps you stumbled across this website, or some other mention of virtue ethics before, and are feeling lost, wondering: what is virtue to begin with? How does one develop virtue? Is this something I want to do?

The Beginning Inquiry: What is Happiness?

Virtue Ethics came about thanks to a particular line of reasoning that Aristotle describes well in his work titled Nicomachean Ethics. He begins by asking one of the most fundamental questions we human beings ever ask ourselves: what is happiness? He doesn't mean here simply "what makes us feel good" or "what pleases us"; rather, he uses the term eudaimonia, often translated as "human flourishing". He wanted to first ask: what makes us human beings truly and fully alive, living to our full potential, completely fulfilled and truly satisfied with life?

The Function Argument

To answer that incredibly difficult question, Aristotle relied on what is often termed "the function argument". He decided to focus on smaller questions first: what makes a carpenter truly fulfilled, truly complete, as a carpenter? What makes a carpenter "flourish" as a carpenter? The answer is fairly common-sensical: the carpenter is most perfectly a carpenter when he has attained mastery over the art of carpentry and can do carpentry well. Ergo, he fails at being a carpenter when he does not do carpentry well.

In other words, the carpenter is fulfilled when he is able to fulfill the function of a carpenter. The same goes for much else in life: the pianist flourishes when she has attained that mastery of the piano that allows her to play the piano as well as she seeks to. Same for shipbuilding, mathematics, architecture, and so forth.

The Function of the Human Being

Taking the function argument, Aristotle asks: what is the "function" of a human being? The difficulty is that being a human is not as simple as being a carpenter; carpentry is defined by a clear end-goal and functional aim (crafting objects from wood), whereas the aim of the human life is much more difficult to ascertain. There is a lot more we can talk about in that regard (see our section on "Delving Deeper into Philosophy" for more on that matter), but Aristotle simplifies it somewhat by pointing out that humans are "rational animals." Like other animals, we have bodies, we require food, drink, and rest, and so on; but we are also differentiated from all animals in one significant respect: we can reason. While all other animals on the earth are irrational, humans are rational. So our special function, in contrast to other animals, is to act according to reason.

Acting According to Reason

What does it mean to act according to reason? It might be helpful to think about how we human beings tend to act. Aristotle goes very deep into the discussion of the human will, talking about all the stages of deliberation, when we consider different possibilities, when we weigh the goods of one choice in contrast to another choice, and so on. What matters for our discussion is simply that we make choices for the sake of some perceived good, and that we can form dispositions towards particular kinds of actions.

Suppose you've never had to clean your car before. There's multiple ways you can do it, and at first, every way to clean it seems annoying and tedious. You have to think about what to do, what method might attain your goal(s) (cleanliness of the car and speed of cleaning it), gather the materials for it, and so forth. So the first few times you clean your car, you might find it more difficult to do. But when you've done it over and over, you begin to attain a disposition towards cleaning your car in this way. It's easier to do. You already know it well, so it doesn't require much thought or effort. It becomes like second nature. This is what we tend to mean by "disposition", and when we talk about acting according to reason, our dispositions become very important. Because if we have a disposition towards acting contrary to reason (we call this disposition a vice), then we are habitually acting contrary to our own fulfillment! But if we have a disposition towards acting in accord with reason (we call such dispositions virtues), then there is a part of our life where we can, with very little difficulty or pain, live our life well!

Vice and Virtue

Consider the difference between a person who has a vice of overeating versus a person who has a virtue of eating moderately and healthily. Which person do you think would be more free and happy? Vices have the insidious aspect of often being hard to break, because they are not born of reason: we didn't think about what to do rationally and choose to act viciously. We followed our passions, so vices are often like a kind of "enslavement of the will". We feel that we should eat healthier, but when the desire to eat as much as we want rises, we fall short of reason's request. On the contrary, one who developed a virtue of eating well is more free and happier; they feel their desires to eat, but they have mastery over it, so they can eat a healthy amount, enjoy and delight in satisfying their hunger, and then withhold themselves from excess and go pursue some other good activity instead.

The process and goal of virtue ethics, then, is to live a life of virtuous activity, which we do by forming these virtues and replacing any vices we may have formed along the way. That is the goal of this VIRTUS application, through our Plans and Trackers, to help users form these virtues. It's not an easy path, because simply following our desires like a mindless beast leads us to vice. But that is precisely what Aristotle notes: we are not mindless, or irrational, animals. The human being is a rational animal, and by learning to act according to reason, we find that we don't actually lose out on what our desires promise us. Instead, we gain the freedom to deny our excessive desires for our own good and thus we gain our free choice of the many goods the world can offer us. Not as a slave to our passions, but as a truly flourishing rational human being.

Conclusion

We've described the core of what philosophers call "Aristotelian virtue ethics," which is the basis for much of our work in VIRTUS. If you still have unanswered questions, whether specific questions about particular virtues or deeper queries about life's meaning, the remainder of the site has more resources and discussion available to you. Virtues are described in their specific pages, listed in the Virtues tab, and deeper philosophical inquiries are explored in the Philosophy tab. Regardless, I hope this application will be useful for you in your journey to truly flourish as a human being!